We are pleased to announce that the University of Minnesota Libraries are partnering with the Drupal development community on the first round of formal usability testing for the Drupal open source content management platform, to take place in February 2008.

• Testing will be conducted at the University's Office for Information Technology’s usability lab with the generous support of Usability Services.
• Seven Drupal community members, including project lead Dries Buytaert, will be on-site as members of the usability test team.
• Results will be presented at Drupalcon Boston, where we’ll discuss future directions indicated by the test results as well as next steps for further usability testing.
• To get involved or to learn more, see this post in the Usability Group.

Our goal is to provide the Drupal development community with a baseline picture of Drupal’s usability for common user tasks. In doing so, the University Libraries hope to improve user experience in a new generation of Drupal-based tools for discovering, managing, and sharing information.

Drupal 6 has been in a code freeze for more than 6 months and is almost ready to be released now. We're only a few bug fixes away from the first final Drupal 6.0 release. Therefore, I just created the DRUPAL-6 CVS branch for Drupal core. This means that while Drupal 6 is being finalized and we prepare for the Drupal 6.0 release, we'll also start accepting new features and improvements for Drupal 7, the next major version of Drupal.

For maximum effectiveness, feature requests for Drupal 7, should go in the the list of feature requests. In my State of Drupal presentation in Barcelona I hinted about what would be the killer Drupal 7 release according to a survey I conducted. While that list is not exclusive and nothing but a wishlist (not a deliverable), it might be worth a look if you want to help shape the future of Drupal.

Incredible Momentum

Drupalcon Boston 2008 is shaping up to be the biggest and best Drupalcon ever. We crunched some numbers this week to compare the pace of registrations between Boston and Barcelona and found that registrations for Boston are running 50% higher than Barcelona at the equivalent stage of the registration cycle (~225 vs. ~150).ﾠ That's incredible momentum, and as long as we have the expected surge in registrations over the next two weeks we'll be in great shape to hit our goal of 500+ attendees.

By Feb 11: Submit Your Session Proposal

Many great sessions have already been submitted. But not enough. So we're setting the session submission deadline for February 11 at 11 p. m. Eastern time (04:00 GMT). If you've been thinking about submitting a session, it's time to put fingers to keyboard and make it happen. And if you are expecting a specific session by a specific person but don't see it on the listings on the site, then please pester the presenter to get the session on the agenda.

By Feb 18: Get Registered, Pay, and Book Hotel

If you haven't registered AND paid your fee (need to be logged in), then the time is now. We've reserved a bunch of hotel rooms at discounted rates. But they go away on February 18 - we can't expect the hotel to hold them forever. So if you want to get a great room at a great rate, you need to get moving.

With Drupal 6.0 around the corner and after a 6 month code freeze, it is time for us developers to start talking about the next version of Drupal. If you plan to work on something, or if you are going to contribute to Drupal in one way or another, please share your "personal battle plan" in the comments. A "personal battle plan" is a summary or itemized list of things you are going to work on in the next couple months.

We are proud to present the third release candidate of Drupal 6.0. We hope that this will be the final release candidate before we can make an official release of Drupal 6.0. Since the second release candidate, we have fixed various issues including JavaScript performance problems, cleaned up menu updates, added several improvements to the update.module, and added a memory requirements check to update.php. We have even added some small usability improvements since RC2.

The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

Several Drupal developers are meeting February 4-6, 2008 in Chicago to work on and re-design Drupal's core data architecture. Topics will include data APIs, object modeling, fields in core, and an overlapping swirl of related ideas. Our goal is to have a design proposal for presentation at DrupalCon Boston 2008.